Panic Blog

UPDATE 12/11/14: After a considerate conversation with Apple, Transmit iOS 1.1.2 has been released with restored “Send To” functionality.

While the process feels less-than-perfect, this resolution is a nice reminder that, just as we thought, there are good people at Apple who will push hard to do the right thing. We hope you enjoy Transmit iOS 1.1.2.

— ORIGINAL POST —

Transmit iOS 1.1.1 is out, fixing a few bugs in our surprisingly powerful file management app for your iPhone or iPad.

Also, at Apple’s request, we had to remove the ability to “Send” files to other services, including iCloud Drive.

In short, we’re told that while Transmit iOS can download content from iCloud Drive, we cannot upload content to iCloud Drive unless the content was created in the app itself. Apple says this use would violate 2.23 — “Apps must follow the iOS Data Storage Guidelines or they will be rejected” — but oddly that page says nothing about iCloud Drive or appropriate uses for iCloud Drive.

If the issue is just iCloud Drive, why did we remove the other destinations? We had no choice. iCloud Drive exists in this sheet:

The above sheet is 100% controlled by iOS — we can’t touch it. Since we can’t touch the sheet, we can’t remove just iCloud Drive from the sheet, so we have to remove the whole sheet.

Our seriously sincere apologies to everyone who used or purchased Transmit iOS with this feature.

The good news? Transmit iOS remains incredibly capable and useful app despite this omission — as further evidenced by this awesome five-mice review for Transmit iOS in MacUser UK.

There are good people working at Apple who will read this, be frustrated, and hopefully try to fix the situation. Hopefully, we can return this functionality to Transmit iOS in some form, someday. We’ll let you know.

UPDATE 12/11/14: After a considerate conversation with Apple, Transmit iOS 1.1.2 has been released with restored “Send To” functionality.

Unison — our excellent OS X app for accessing Usenet Newsgroups and the many wonders and mysteries contained within — has reached the end of its road after years of faithful service.

First, a brand-new Unison 2.2.

Unison’s end is bittersweet. The market for a Usenet client in 2014 isn’t exactly huge. But if you know Panic,  you know we do our very best to never drop things awkwardly — we like to leave our apps in a good place for our (very) valued users.

So we’re excited to release a nice, final update to Unison.

Unison 2.2 adds the #1 feature request for Unison: multi-connection downloads for much faster transfers. It also adds a lot more Retina assets for more beautiful browsing on newer machines, and fixes many little bugs and quirks.

It’s a great update for all Unison fans.

Now free, and unsupported.

While we can no longer work on Unison or offer support for it, the good news is it’s also free. This version of the app will be automatically unlocked for all users, no serial needed.

Just download it right there:

What about Unison Access?

For now, Unison Access will continue to work just as it does today for all current subscribers. That said, we’re no longer accepting new signups. We figure we’ll migrate people to another service at some point in the future. If that happens, we’ll contact you by e-mail.

Thank you sincerely.

Our deepest thanks to each and every one of  you who used, bought, or enjoyed Unison. We really enjoyed making this app and providing it to you. We hope it serves you well into the future!

With the release of Transmit iOS and Prompt 2, we excitedly added two Panic Pack bundles to the App Store. Bundles are a great chance to reward loyal customers a little bit of a discount on our software — something that was not possible to do on the App Store previously.

Even better, customers can “Complete My Bundle” — if they’ve bought any of our apps, they can pay the difference to receive additional missing apps at a discount.

But once our bundles hit the App Store, some curious “Complete My Bundle” questions began to roll in. Pricing seemed to be weird or inconsistent. So we did a little digging and got some good tips on Twitter.

Here’s all you need to know:

Complete My Bundle takes whatever money you’ve paid for the individual apps and applies that towards the bundle’s fixed price. So, if you buy an app on sale, or use a promo code, your Complete My Bundle price can be different than someone else’s, and in some situations it might be cheaper to buy the remaining app(s) individually.

That’s it.

It explains a mystery like this:

The user owns three of the four apps. Why would the user’s Complete My Bundle price be $10.02, if Prompt 2 alone is $9.99?

Here’s why: the user bought Transmit iOS for $9.99, Status Board for $9.99, and Diet Coda when it was briefly on SALE for $9.99. That’s a total of $29.97 worth of “credit” towards the price of the bundle. Now, the bundle’s fixed price is $39.99, based off current app prices. See where this is going? $39.99, minus $29.97 in credit, equals $10.02. Bingo. Don’t complete this bundle.

Apple has just posted a useful Knowledge Base Article covering this issue (and others) — it’s helpful information that we will likely be pointing our customers towards.

We hope this helps clear up any mysteries, and as always, we’re very happy that you’re buying our software and we deeply appreciate your support!

Over a year ago, I wrote a blog post about Coda and Sandboxing.

It detailed a thorough list of changes we’d be making to Coda to work under Apple’s Sandboxing restrictions. Click here to read it if you haven’t.

As we continued to work on Coda 2.5—a significant update that we’re really excited about—we continued to discover new corners of the app that presented challenges under sandboxing. Coda, to be fair, is a very complex developer tool and is something of a sandboxing worst-case scenario.

Apple, to their considerable credit, spent a lot of energy assisting us with ideas, workarounds, and temporary exemptions we might be able to use to get around some of the issues. Apple genuinely went above and beyond the call of duty, and we’re really thankful for their help. We got extremely close and jumped over a lot of tricky hurdles thanks to them.

Unfortunately, though, we’ve run out of time.

Coda 2.5 is essentially complete. But, we’re still encountering sandboxing challenges. So, in the interest of finally getting Coda 2.5 out the door and in the hands of you, our very eager and patient customers, we’ve decided it’s time to move on—for now.

In short: Coda 2.5 will not be sandboxed, and therefore will not be available in the Mac App Store.

Please note that this doesn’t mean Coda 2.5 was rejected by Apple, rather that we’re going ahead and proactively making this call since all Mac App Store apps are required to be sandboxed and Coda 2.5 will not be.

The good news? Three-fold.

1. The transition will be effortless.
2. Your workflow will now be unscathed.
3. We’re adding Panic Sync.

Read on.

• I bought Coda in the App Store. What do I need to do?

Nothing right now. Keep App Store Coda on your system and use it.

Then, when Coda 2.5 is released, you’ll simply download Coda 2.5 directly from our website. It’ll locate your installed Mac App Store copy, and it will unlock. That’s it. You’ve transitioned. Free of charge.

• What about iCloud Sync of my sites?

iCloud requires the App Store, so that’s out. But we have great news. We never want to short-change our paying customers, so we’ve spent many months working on Panic Sync, our own super-easy, super-secure syncing solution that gives you power over your data. And Panic Sync will work between Panic apps—Coda and Diet Coda to start. And Panic Sync is free. In short, we’ll trade you iCloud for something great.

• What about automatic updating?

Still there. Coda has a great built-in updater. In fact, you’ll get critical updates faster than ever before.

• What about easy installation on a new computer?

We love that part of the Mac App Store. Sigh. But from now on, you’ll have to download Coda 2.5 directly from our website. Hopefully, that’s a very minor inconvenience; we’ll make sure it downloads fast and easy.

• Will Coda ever be sandboxed or return to the App Store?

We hope so! We will always evaluate the possibility of sandboxing with each future release of Coda.

• What’s new in Coda 2.5? When will it be released?

Shh… we’ve been posting sneak peeks of new features on Twitter. And we’re in late beta, but no date is set.

Thank you so much for reading and understanding. Most importantly, thank you for using Coda!

Update: Coda 2.5 is now available! Read more about it and get it here.

You might be familiar with where it all started: the status board we put on our Panic office wall in 2010.

Since then, as you may know, we turned that status board into an iPad app called Status Board. Now everyone can have a cool, beautiful, data-packed status board on their desk or wall.

And since we built the app, we rebuilt our status board, making it twice as good! (Literally.)

No, you’re not seeing double — this time we went with two goofy screens of stuff.

It’s pretty glorious.

About The Panels

Here are some implementation notes on our board:

Traditionally Panic is quiet about how-are-we-doing data. It always feels like a possible distraction for our hard-working team. But we’re always changing, and this revenue Graph panel has been fascinating. Every day a script totals up our direct sales data, then retrieves our App Store sales data using AppFigures and their nice API. The totals get dumped into a database, and then we make that available via a simple PHP script that outputs JSON to the Status Board. That might sound tricky, but all told it took about a day of work to make happen.

Units have been especially interesting since they reveal so much about the economics of (our) iOS software, as this Graph panel shows. Although (our) iOS apps sell a respectable number of units, the revenue they bring in barely charts compared to our Mac stalwarts. So far! We’re working hard on improving our iOS apps, and trying new ideas, in order to crack the iOS market a little bit more. (Sorry this chart was pre-Status Board, which is doing well!) By the way, Graph documentation is here.

The Support team works tirelessly to fight this tide! This is just an Email panel, which ties into our IMAP server. It took about 3 minutes to set up, and has been incredibly useful to see what our support load is at a very quick glance. (On the server, each Support person shares a single “Help” IMAP account, which has folders for each support person, and a script distributes the incoming support requests round-robin style.)

Conversely, this Graph panel this is a great way to quickly see how many support responses are going out the door. (Of course, it’s not a competition — it’s just for fun.) To get accurate Sent counts, we have a script that looks at both outgoing Twitter replies, and outgoing e-mails, and totals them up per-person into JSON.

This list is using our Table panel, connecting to an HTML file on our server. (Table documentation is here.) This is an edited version to protect our secret projects, of course. A project list is always tricky, since it’s the most manually-updated thing on the board, and always runs the risk of being stale. But, it’s fun to see who’s working on what.

This is our car2go map, so we can quickly see if there are any cars near the office that we can hijack and drive home at the end of the day. It’s totally custom — we’re using the Do-It-Yourself panel so it’s just a little web page on our server. We signed up for the car2go API and combined their data with Google maps and some nice CSS animation. If enough people are interested, we might make this available to others. (Does your city have car2go?)

This is another Do-It-Yourself panel to show everyone’s bus lines. Sometimes end-of-the-day conversations are abruptly interrupted when we notice a bus is nearby. Logan has more recently made his own TriMet panel that we like a lot.

Hardware Notes

• This time, we chose the Samsung DE55A 55″ Professional Display. Bright, thin bezel, built to stay on.
• To cover up the Samsung logo, we used a piece of black non-glare artist tape. (Electrical tape was too shiny.)
• We installed a double gang outlet in the wall, to support 2 TV’s and 2 iPad chargers. Permanent power.
• We applied 3M Magnet Tape to the back of our iPads. They just stick right to the back of the display:

As people continue to build new things, our Status Board seems to change every week. Since taking these photos we’ve already added GoSquared, SNMP traffic graphs, and much more. That’s the best/worst thing about Status Board: it’s now so easy to make a cool Status Board that it’s hard to know when to stop. But hey, it’s fun!

If you’ve used Status Board to make a cool status board, send us a photo!